Amazon uncloaks sky-high Java kit

Amazon has unveiled a Java SDK for building sky-high applications on its so-called infrastructure cloud.

Announced with a blog post, the new SDK includes a set of APIs designed to hide some of the "low-level plumbing" developers typically encounter when building applications on the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS), including authentication and error handling.

AWS is a set of web services offering on-demand access to scalable compute resources, such as processing power and storage, and various development tools the run atop this virtual infrastructure. The Java SDK supports most of the latest tools available with the company's primary EC2 (processing power) and S3 (storage services) as well as most other services, including Amazon SimpleDB (the company's down-and-dirty proprietary database), the Amazon Relational Database Service (MySQL), and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop).

The kit also includes code samples, documentation, and support for the just-updated AWS Eclipse toolkit. With this toolkit, you can use the Eclipse Java IDE add the AWS SDK to an existing Java project, or create a new Java project based on the SDK. The SDK requires the J2SE Development Kit 5.0 or later, and you can download it here. ®